A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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| Ilium | Bitter Waters | Tainted Trail |
| Alien Taste | I Am Legend | Flashman's Lady |
| Flash in the Great Game | Flashman at the Charge | Flash for Freedom |
Ilium, Dan Simmons (2003), 570 pp (hb).
To be honest, this book ended up being not quite what I was expecting, which shows more than anything else, I suppose, that my vague and ill-formed expectations were askew . Too much reading about Pressfield's Golden Age Greeks and Mythological Age Amazons had me anticipating that this would be some kind of re-telling of the Iliad, with maybe a few science fiction touches thrown in here and there. And come to think of it, that's one way of describing Ilium. Except, well, not. Or at least, that misses at least a good two-thirds of what's going on in this big, sprawling, wildly entertaining hunk of story.
A warning: I'm going to end up spoiling some of the plot, for those who care about such things. Ilium is divided into three narrative strands. These strands ultimately converge near the latter part of the book; at first, it's not clear quite how they're related, although there are hints that make speculation not too hard. The first thread starts out with what I was expecting, in a vague sort of way: We're somewhere in the opening books of the Iliad, just around the time Achilles and Agammemnon have their major spat. The gods and goddesses are real, not mythological story devices, and they've somehow resurrected various Homeric scholars to serve as their battleground observers. It turns out that these gods and goddesses are "post-humans" from a couple of millennia in the future (counting from the 21st century, that is), and they have a number of technological goodies--chief among them being their quantum teleportation devices, although the "morphing" bracelets and flying anti-grav chariots are nifty, too--that they both use themselves and bestow on their scholarly servants as they run around, disguised as soldiers and recording the action. Zeus, as it turns out, has banned all knowledge of how the events of the Iliad turn out from dissemination among the "divine" players, although the scholars all know what's supposed to happen next at any given time. And so far, it's pretty well followed the script. This thread is told by one Thomas Hockenberry, nebbishy classics professor from the late 20th/early 21st century. Not long into his story, events begin to run off the rails, helped in no small part by Thomas himself, who realizes that his number is up around the time Aphrodite involves him in a plot to assassinate Athena.
One of the other two threads involves members of the remnant human population, only a few thousand strong, left on Earth after the post-humans evolved and left. They are post-literate, indolent, in the grip of a religious myth that they don't even realize is there--a more clued-in character sneeringly refers to them as "eloi". A small group get together and without hardly realizing what they're doing, stumble off to explore and have adventures. The final thread centers on sentient robots from the society that evolved out in the outer solar system, among the gas giant moons and so forth. They've discovered that very strange things are going on on the surface of Mars, and dispatch a mission to reconnoiter the situation. The two main members that survive happen to be, respectively, a Shakespeare enthusiast and a Proust enthusiast, and they're good for some pretty decent comic relief. Events crash to a conclusion, and the strands more-or-less merge when Hockenberry and friends (in a fulfillment of geekboy fantasies everywhere, he somehow ends up spending the night with Helen of Troy) manage to subvert the course of the Iliad, get Hector and Achilles to make common cause, and point them at Olympos--where, just in the nick of time, they find allies in the form of all those sentient robots from the outer solar system. It sounds ludicrously over the top, and I suppose it is, but trust me, it's a lot of fun getting there. Of course, the story isn't over with the beginning of the siege of Olympos, even if the book is, so we have to wait for another volume to come out to continue it. We're left with this little tease near the end to whet our appetites:
Zeus steps forward, passing through the aegis like a giant stepping through a rippling waterfall.
Achilles walks out into no-man's-land to face the Father of the Gods.
"DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY BEFORE YOU AND YOUR SPECIES DIE?" says Zeus, his tone conversational but so amplified that it carries to the farthest reaches of the field, even to the men on the Greek ships at sea.
Achilles pauses, looks over his shoulder at the masses of men behind him, turns back, looks past Zeus toward Olympos and the masses of gods in front of him, and then crooks his neck to look up again at towering Zeus.
"Surrender now," says Achilles, "and we'll spare your goddesses's lives so they can be our slaves and courtesans."
Check it out. I'll be looking forward to the sequel.
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Bitter Waters, Wen Spencer (2003), 308 pp (pb).
The adventures of Ukiah and Max, part trois. In this one, the nasty alien gang is pretty much absent; the looming peril is supplied by a wacked-out religious cult that's got its hands on some really nasty bio-weapon producers that the nasty alien gang was once in possession of. Of course, Ukiah and Max have to follow the twists and turns of the mystery to its conclusion, saving the world from great peril in the process. I suppose there's some grounds for saying that there's been character development over the course of these three novels, but it hasn't struck me as being particularly compelling. The character work has seemed adequate to carry the requirements of the plot. The goofiness of the biology that's thrown in here started to catch up to me by this novel, but it's still a fun enough story, again, of the quick trashy page-turner variety.
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Tainted Trail, Wen Spencer (2002), 311 pp (pb).
The second book to follow Ukiah Oregon and his partner Max, sequel to Alien Taste. This one serves as sort of an origin story of sorts for Ukiah, as the daughter of a good friend of he and Max has gone missing around the area where Ukiah was first discovered. They head off to the wilds of Oregon to see if they can track her down, and stumble into the mystery both of Ukiah's background (turns out he's a lot older than the 20 or so he looks) and of an infestation of the bad-guy alien band. Once again, the goofiness of the sci-fi exposition is outpaced, if only barely sometimes, by the clipping along of the plot.
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Alien Taste, Wen Spencer (2001), 313 pp (pb).
Debut novel by a new author; I was alerted to these by Chadand Kate, who said generally nice things about it. This is basically a P.I. novel with lots of sci-fi stuff thrown in. The P.I. team is composed of Max Bennett, the grizzled veteran, and his young pup of a partner, Ukiah Oregon--named after the town where he was found as a sort of feral wolf-boy a few years earlier. Turns out Ukiah isn't exactly 100% human...he's more like a breeding experiment on the part of the forerunners of an alien invasion fleet. And what's the use of having some funky alien DNA if it doesn't give you other-worldly senses, perfect recall, and near-immortality? Anyway, he and Max get called by the police to track what seems at first to be a nasty killer/kidnapper, and end up getting sucked into a turf war cum ongoing apocalypse between rival alien factions.
The assessment that these books couldn't dial great literature on a satellite phone gets it just about right, but the pace clips along fast enough to keep you reading, without getting too caught up in the hand-wavey, goofy technobabble. In other words, it's a certain flavor of trashy page-turner, in a good sort of way.
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I Am Legend, Richard Matheson (1954), 170 pp (hb).
I'm not really into vampire stories (I can waive away my Buffy interlude by noting that that wasn't about the vampires, per se). Nevertheless, I've heard enough about this story to pick it up and give it a look. I imagine that when it was first published, it seemed more innovative or original than it seems now. It pushes the trope of vampirism as a sort of viral disease, biologically based, with the protagonist taking a sort of scientific approach to figure out what's going on.
The protagonist Robert Neville is the last surviving human, so far as he knows, in southern California (or anywhere else). He's boarded up and enforced a house that he retreats into at night to stay safe. During the day, he comes out to make repairs to the house, forage for food and supplies, and kill off any vampires he runs across. It's a bleak little tale, but somehow it didn't quite grab me the way it could have. For one thing, the ending is kind of anti-climactic. Or maybe it's just like I said...I'm not really into vampire stories.
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Flashman's Lady, George MacDonald Fraser (1977), 311 pp (tpb).
The sixth installment of the Flashman Papers, and one wherein Flashman's beloved bride, the lovely but vacant-headed Elspeth comes to the fore. Flash has always been very careful to note, in the midst of all the whoring and lechery that he whole-heartedly throws himself into, that he has a special soft spot in his heart for Elspeth. Not that it stops him for a second, although he always brings up how he's just sure that she's stepping out on him, too, when he's not around.
At any rate, this volume steps out of chronological order, going back to fill in a gap in Flashman's history. It's right after his Afghan adventures, recounted in the first book, and Flashy is kicking about London and basking in his not-yet-waning fame. And of course, Elspeth, who's a social butterfly, is enjoying his fame even more. Flashman gets sucked in to playing in a couple of cricket matches, which brings he and Elspeth within the orbit of Don Solomon Haslem, a wealthy merchant with shady antecedants. Before long, Flashman and Elspeth have been invited aboard Don Solomon's yacht for a cruise to the Mysterious Orient. When they get to Singapore, the Don puts into effect his real plan, the abduction of Elspeth. Turns out he's really a pirate lord, one of many in that part of the world. To recover his fair bride, Flashman gets caught up in an expedition against the pirate lairs of the Borneo coast. Oh, and the last hundred pages or so are a mini-adventure wherein Flashy serves as royal stud at the court of the very psychotic Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar. Another enjoyable adventure...not the best in the lot, but certainly serviceable.
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Flashman in the Great Game, George MacDonald Fraser (1975), 324 pp (tpb).
The fifth volume of the mis-adventures of Harry Flashman, Victorian gentleman extraordinaire. He's been back in England for a few months following his escapades in the last volume, when someone high up in government recollects that he'd be the perfect choice to do a little clandestine intelligence gathering in India, where word of a possible Russian plot has been filtering out. Before Flashy can think up a suitably compelling excuse, he's off to India, where he goes undercover as a native Afghani cavalry trooper, and eventually gets caught up in the midst of the great mutiny of '56, when the sepoy troops riot against the British overlords and do some serious damage before finally being suppressed. Naturally, Flashman somehow manages to find himself in the thick of it all.
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Flash at the Charge, George MacDonald Fraser (1973), 277 pp (hb).
The fourth installment of the Flashman Papers. This one doesn't pick up immediately following the close of the last one; it instead opens in 1854, after a gap of five or six years (a gap that's filled in, more or less, in later installments). Flashman is again at loose ends around town, but unfortunately for Flashy's high regard for the intact condition of his own skin, things are heating up on the foreign policy front--the Tsar is up to tricks, the English public is beginning to yammer for him to be taught a lesson, and as Flashy calculates the score, "when the press starts to beat the drum and the public are clamouring for the foreigners' blood to be spilled--by someone other than themselves--they have a habit of looking round for their old champions." Which, as undeserved as the distinction may be, includes one Harry Flashman. So that crafty fellow decides to preemptively re-enlist, but as a member of the Board of Ordnance. A nice plan, but it derails when he gets detailed by the royal family (who remember his alleged heroics from the Afghan campaign) to play nursemaid to one of the Queen's nephews, an eager young lad of eighteen or so. There's an amusing interlude of Flashman shepherding young Willy about town before they get sent off to join the forces assembling in the Crimea. Here, for example, is the outcome of Willy's insistence that he get to have his first carnal encounter:
I couldn't budge him. So in the end I decided to let him have his way, and make sure there were no snags, and that it was done safe and quiet. I took him off to a very high-priced place I knew in St. John's wood, swore the old bawd to secrecy, and stated the randy little pig's requirements. She did him proud, too, with a strapping blonde wench--satin boots and all--and at the sight of her Willy moaned feverishly and pointed, quivering, like a setter. He was trying to clamber all over her almost before the door closed, and of course he made a fearful mess of it, thrashing away like a stoat in a sack, and getting nowhere. It made me quite sentimental to watch him--reminded me of my own ardent youth, when every coupling began with an eager stagger across the floor trying to disentangle one's breeches from one's ankles.
Ahem. Well, anyway, our boys get to the Crimean peninsula just in time for the fabulous military cock-up known to posterity as the Charge of the Light Brigade. Which, of course, Flashy must be part of, through absolutely no intent or doing of his own. That comes about half-way through the book; the second half involves Our Hero being taken prisoner by the Russians, dallying with a Russian heiress, escaping to try to warn British forces of the Russian plot to strike at British holdings in India, and getting caught up in the campaign of a bunch of Central Asian tribesmen in their strike at Russian forces moving overland toward India. Flashy also has his one and only opportunity to be suicidally brave when he's surreptitiously drugged with bhang before the big fight:
The terrible thing was that I remembered the battle very clearly, and my own incredible behaviour--I knew I'd gone bawling about like a Viking in drink, seeking sorrow and raving heroically in murderous rage, but I couldn't for the life of me understand why. It had been utterly against nature, instinct and judgement--and I knew it hadn't been booze, because I hadn't had any, and anyway the liquor hasn't been distilled that can make me oblivious of self-preservation. It appalled me, for what security does a right-thinking coward have, if he loses his sense of panic?
Another fun historical adventure; yeah, Flashman is a moral pygmy, but he really does make a great commentator.
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Flash for Freedom, George MacDonald Fraser (1971), 281 pp (tpb).
The third excerpt from the "Flashman Papers" (Fraser's conceit all along has been that these stories are derived from Flashman's private recollections, set down in the early 1900s, near the end of his life, and only recently discovered in the possession of a decendant. Fraser is thus, by this amiable fiction, the editor rather than the author). It's as much, or more, of a romp as the first two.
Flashman is kicking around town, at loose ends following his return from his German adventure as Bismarck's cats-paw, when he is framed for cheating at cards by an enemy with revenge on his mind. Before he can hardly turn around, he's been bundled off for parts foreign by his miserly Scots father-in-law, who has mercantile connections in unexpected places. Flashy's new berth turns out to be on a slave ship, captained by a psychotic refugee from Oxford, who quotes the classics in Latin, in between flying into a homicidal rage at just about everything. They make a stop on the African coast to pick up a load of prisoners from one of the chiefs with whom the captain has a standing deal, and head off to America, where our Flash has opportunity to impersonate an undercover British naval officer, an underground railroad operative, and a plantation overseer, among others. He also runs into then-Congressman Lincoln, who recognizes that Flashman is indulging in some sort of humbug, but goes along with it anyway. Indeed, it's Lincoln that pulls Flashy's bacon out of the fire when he and his companion, an escaped slave, are being pursued across the Ohio River by a rabid band of slave-catchers:
"And I'm warning you, Buck!" Lincoln's voice was suddenly sharp. "Oh, I know you, I reckon. You're a real hard-barked Kentucky boy, own brother to the small-pox, weaned on snake juice and grizzly hide, aren't you? You've killed more niggers than the dysentery, and your grandma can lick any white man in Tennessee. You talk big, step high, and do what you please, and if any 'legal beanpole' in a store suit gets in your way you'll cut him right down to size, won't you just? He's not a practical man, is he? But you are, Buck--when you've got your gang at your back! Yes, sir, you're a practical man, all right." [...]
"So am I, Buck. And more--for the benefit of any shirt-tail chawbacon with a big mouth, I'm a who's-yar boy from Indiana myself, and I've put down better men than you just by spitting teeth at them. If you doubt it, come ahead! You want these people--you're going to take them?" He gestured towards Cassy. "All right, Buck--you try it. Just--try it."
It seems anomalous, incongruous, vaguely wrong even for an adventure set among such misery and injustice to be enjoyable. And yet, this is. As usual, Flashman is clear-eyed and amoral (he makes much of his essential pusillanimity and moral cowardice, and it's a fair point, but it seems to me that he's as much hyper-self-interested as he is actively bad) in his description of events. Because he cares about appearances and reputation, he often stumbles into doing an approximation of the "right thing," if for the wrong reasons, although he often doesn't, too. At any rate, yes, there's misery and oppression in plenty, but it's still quite an adventure.
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